Jen had to lean closer to hear, and when she did, she was struck by the unmistakable sound of a sweet, familiar melody—one that was intricately tied to waiting. Jen had listened to the song on repeat while she prayed and prayed and prayed for her daughter to come home. Then God answered her prayer, and Jen stopped listening. Now Jubilee was sitting in the backyard rocking her doll, singing lyrics that brought her back to that place of acute longing so fast she nearly hissed at the sharpness of it.
The thing was, Jen had no idea where Jubilee would have learned it. Not at their new church. They played contemporary music there.
Jen came out of her stretch and walked across the freshly mowed lawn. “That’s a pretty song you’re singing to your baby.”
Jubilee ran her flat palm over Baby’s curly hair.
Jen sat beside them and plucked up a blade of grass. “Where did you learn it?”
“He sang it to me in the dark, when the doors went shut.”
When the doors went shut.
She was talking about the orphanage.
And suddenly, this felt like holy ground, a burning bush, and Jen should take off her running shoes. Jubilee didn’t like to talk about the orphanage. Any time she or Nick tried to bring it up, Jubilee got agitated.
Jen exchanged a look with Nick, whose ears were perked up and listening.
“Who sang it to you?” Jen asked.
“I didn’t know his name, Mama. He never told me.”
“But he sang that song to you?”
“Uh-huh. He sang it whenever I got afraid.”
Goose bumps marched up Jen’s arms. Men were not allowed inside at night. The orphanage director locked the girls in, and if a man did come, it wouldn’t be to sing. Certainly not this song.
“He would sing to me”—Jubilee threw her arms over her head, Baby lifted toward the sky—“and all the scary things would fly away!”
A knot tied in Jen’s throat. She and Nick looked at each other again, and then they looked at their daughter sitting in the grass. She was singing. Their Liberian daughter was singing the words to an old Christian hymn—one a mysterious man sang to her in the dark when the doors went shut and she was most afraid.
“It is well…with my soul.”
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”
Forty-Seven
Jen used the scissor blade to slice through the tape and pulled the lid of the box open. There was a sticky note on top:
I was doing some spring cleaning and finally mustered up the courage to tackle the dreaded storage room. Your father is so proud! Don’t throw any of this away! If you don’t want it, I will put it back in storage. You just can’t tell your father! XOXO
Jen stuck the sticky note on the counter and pulled out a small, neatly folded, tattered afghan, its pale pink having gone a dull gray years ago. Mom had called it her lovey, and Jen slept with it balled beneath her chin every night until she gave it up to go to a weeklong church camp the summer after sixth grade.
She pressed her nose against the knitted wool. It smelled like moth balls.
Underneath the blanket was a picture she’d made of a frog on a lily pad, drawn with the pastel set she got from her Aunt Meg on her tenth birthday. It won a spot in her elementary school art show. Mom framed it in one of those cheap plastic frames they sold at the dollar store. There were two soccer trophies from her short-lived soccer career. Baseball cards from her tomboy phase, carefully tucked inside plastic protector sheets. A plastic baggie of stray board-game pieces—the metallic thimble from Monopoly, some Battleship pegs, the pink and blue plastic cars from Life. A bare-bottomed troll with a jewel in its belly. This one had rainbow-colored hair and a black beard drawn on his chin with permanent marker. She remembered naming him Fred. There were a few children’s books too. Jen smoothed her hand over the one on top—The Velveteen Rabbit.
“What is that?” Jubilee asked, coming into the kitchen with Baby tucked under her arm. She carried her everywhere these days.
“This,” Jen said, tickling Fred’s fluffy hair against Jubilee’s cheek, “is some of my old stuff from when I was your age.”
“Really?” She stood on her tiptoes and peeked inside.
“Really.” Jen pulled out the last item at the very bottom. It was a scrapbook her mother made. “You can look through it if you want.”
“Really?” Jubilee said again.
Jen helped her get the box into the living room. Then she returned to the kitchen and brushed her hand over the deep-purple cloth cover of the scrapbook, wiping away the dust.
It cracked when she opened it.
There was a pile of wrinkled, loose papers tucked in the front. Award certificates. Report cards. More pastel-inspired artwork. A third-grade writing assignment titled “Jennifer’s Big Fortune,” written and illustrated by Jennifer Newlin. She’d drawn a picture of a crystal ball on the front. The story itself was five pages long, and it was all about her future. How she would marry Joey Turner, a boy in class who had a mullet everyone thought was so cool. He chased all the girls with earthworms at recess, and if he caught you, he’d try to make you kiss it. Jen remembered wanting to kiss Joey instead. In “Jennifer’s Big Fortune,” Joey was the lead guitarist for a punk band and she was a veterinarian. They lived in Alaska and had four children—two sets of twins, boys and girls.
There was a crayon drawing on the final page. Her with a stethoscope around her neck and Joey with his impressive mullet and a guitar, along with a dog, and a cat, and a rabbit, and a horse, and their four peach-colored children. Two blond-headed identical boys and two brown-haired identical girls.
Shaking her head, Jen set the loose papers aside and began turning pages, wondering if Mom looked through them too, surprised that she hadn’t removed the pictures of Brandon—actual evidence that he did exist. Photograph after photograph of the two of them, one with his arm slung around her shoulder in a pumpkin patch. Even then, he had the kind of eyes people commented on—big and blue with dark, long eyelashes. Girls loved them in high school, just like they loved his easygoing smile and his fun-loving personality. That was the Brandon she would always remember.
Not the Brandon drugs had turned her brother into.
She turned another page and ran her fingers over the one on top.
The four of them in their church clothes beneath the weeping willow out front, the two children splattered with mud. It was an after-church potluck pic. They went to every one because Daddy was an elder, and he loved all the food. She and Brandon were usually bored to death. Only this time, the Trenton boys found a mud puddle and dared Brandon to jump in. He did, of course, and then in a moment of impulsivity, Jen jumped after him—terrified and delighted at the squish of mud against her Mary Janes. Before she knew it, all the kids were jumping in. Stomping about. Laughing and screaming and swinging around on the willow branches like Tarzan.
Then their father snapped his fingers, and it was like jolting awake from a dream.
Mrs. Bother held up the camera slung around her neck. She was an old lady with bouffant hair who loved church hats and designated herself their church’s official photographer. She snapped the picture—Brandon and Jen covered in mud from head to toe—and smiled fondly at Daddy with a nostalgic sparkle in her eye. “Oh, to be young again.”
Daddy had smiled back.
And Jen felt a tsunami of relief.
Oh, good, she thought. He’s not mad.
But then they climbed into the car, and the back of his neck got red like a beet, and as they drove out of sight, he said in a deep growl, “Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again, do you hear?”
They both had to scrub their clothes clean when they got home.
Jen never jumped in another mud puddle again.
She closed the scrapbook. She tucked it under her arm to bring it up to her room when something slipped out from the
pages and fluttered to the floor. It looked like an old newspaper article, yellowed with age.
Jen unfolded it.
It wasn’t about her or Brandon. In fact, it was dated before she and Brandon were born. 1977, the year her parents got married. Daddy was 32 and principal at the local high school. This was before he was a superintendent. Mama was only nineteen and head-over-heels in love. The news article contained a black-and-white picture of the two of them. Mama smiling. Daddy looking serious. But it wasn’t from their wedding day. Jen’s attention moved upward, to the headline.
Oakdale Principal Opposes Integration
He called integration a political agenda. He said it was more damaging then it was beneficial. In his experience, kids learned best with their own kind.
Their own kind.
Her father said these words.
Jen pressed the ringing phone against her ear and paced in the small upstairs bathroom. She locked herself inside while Jubilee went through the nostalgia downstairs.
When Mom answered, she didn’t say hello. She sang into the line—all southern honey and sunshine—like she’d been watching for Jen’s phone call. “I take it the booooox arrrriiiived!”
Jen looked at the article clasped in her hand.
Their own kind.
“Isn’t it a hoot? I’d forgotten all about those trolls. Oh, those hideous trolls. And the board-game pieces! Remember when you use to make artwork out of them? It made your daddy fit to be tied, but Mrs. Orwille thought it was creative. Remember her? Your old art teacher.”
“Mama.”
“She used to say to me, Carol, you better get that girl in classes over the summer. She has an eye, and I’ll die if I see it go to waste. That’s what she called it too. An eye. She was always so dramatic. And I would tell her—”
“Mama!”
The excited jabbering stopped.
Jen’s mouth felt like cotton. “I found a newspaper article in the scrapbook.”
“I’m sure you did. I put all kinds of things in there. Did you see that old story you wrote? ‘Jennifer’s Big Fortune.’ That ridiculous crystal ball sure embarrassed your father. And Joey Turner. I wonder whatever happened to Joey Turner?”
“The article was about Dad.”
“Oh. Well, it must have slipped in by accident. Lord knows, the man had enough of them. He was always making the papers.” Porcelain clanked on the other end. Water ran. Mom was doing the dishes. “What was this one about? Some award he won, probably.”
“It says he opposed integration.”
The dishes stopped clanking.
Jen waited. She waited for her mother to explain. The journalist misquoted him. Dad sued for slander. But that wasn’t what her mother said.
“Oh sugar, that was a long time ago. It was a different mind-set back then.”
A different mind-set.
This was her explanation.
“Politicians were using children to push their agendas. To be honest, Jennifer, integration was a nightmare back then. People were pushing it too fast. There were so many problems. It needed to happen organically.”
Organically.
And how did she suppose that would happen?
Or maybe she saw the one or two black kids in every classroom and thought education already had integrated. Never mind districts like South Fork.
“Is this why you didn’t want us to adopt?”
There was a moment of loud silence, and then, “How dare you say such a thing.”
How dare she?
But it was true. Her parents had been nothing but ominous warnings when Jen and Nick made their announcement. Her father didn’t come to the airport when Jubilee came home. He barely looked at his granddaughter over Christmas break, but then he barely looked at his daughter either, so Jen hadn’t given it much thought. But maybe she should have.
Oakdale Principal Opposes Integration
Her father was a racist. He was a racist, and she didn’t even know it.
“I love my granddaughter. I have been nothing but supportive ever since she came home. I have loved her and embraced her and given her everything I would have given my own flesh and blood. I would have given her more too, if you hadn’t kept her away from us.”
“We weren’t keeping her away from you. We were cocooning!” Something her mother refused to understand. “We needed Jubilee to understand that we are her mom and dad.”
“And I’m her grandmother. But I guess that doesn’t count for anything.”
Jen brought her hand and the article up to her face in a fist.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing right now, Jennifer. I send you something nice in the mail. Your father and I fly your whole family home for Christmas. I drove up there and helped y’all move in, and you have the audacity to accuse us of…of…” But Mama wouldn’t say it. She wouldn’t say what she thought Jen was accusing them of. “We deserve to be treated better than this.”
Before Jen could take a breath, before she could even unclench her fist, the line went dead in her ear.
Her mother had hung up on her.
Jen stood in front of the toilet, staring at the crumpled newspaper clipping in her hand.
Milliken v. Bradley Revisited
Four short years after the Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1970, the Supreme Court overturned its previous ruling, blocking metro-wide plans to desegregate urban schools. The majority said they found no evidence that the government had encouraged segregation in the metro area. For all intents and purposes, this decision made Brown v. Board of Education null and void in isolated urban districts.
Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.
—ORVILLE HUBBARD, segregationist mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, from 1942–1978
Forty-Eight
A yawn split Jen’s mouth as she uncapped Derek Royce’s medication. He had such a severe case of ADHD, he needed to take a second dose after lunch. He wasn’t the only one. In fact, her office was a zoo after lunch. He was simply the one who needed the most reminders, often in the form of a phone call to his fifth-period teacher.
“Derek needs to come down and take his meds.”
Several minutes later, Derek would wander in. He was a skinny kid with big ears and pale skin and an unwavering stare. He didn’t look anything like his father, and yet, every time he came, Jen remembered the way Leif and Nick squared off at Unpack Your Backpack night. She remembered the racist comments Leif made in front Jubilee, in front of Anaya and Nia’s mother. Now Jen wondered if she’d be able to look at Derek without thinking of her own father and that article.
Oakdale Principal Opposes Integration
She and Nick had stayed up past midnight talking about it, dissecting her childhood, trying to find evidence that she had missed. She wasn’t sure what was harder to wrap her mind around—the fact that her father held those kinds of beliefs or the fact that she had no idea her father held those kinds of beliefs. That particular skeleton remained safely tucked away in the family closet.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Covington?”
Jen looked up.
Taylor Gray stood in her office doorway—a younger, taller, skinnier version of her mother. Jen and Camille hadn’t done more than exchange pleasantries since the N-word incident. Paige wrote an apology. Jubilee accepted it. Nick encouraged her to play with kids like Nia and Sarah.
Derek popped the pill into his mouth and drank it down with the small Dixie cup of water Jen provided.
“Hi,” he said to Taylor.
“Hi,” she said back, her cheeks blushing under that discomforting, unrelenting stare of his.
“You can head back to class now, Derek,” Jen said.
He squished the Dixie cup and slam-dunked it into the garbage can by the door. He stared at Taylor as he
walked out. By the time he was gone, the blush in her cheeks had turned bright red.
“Do you and Derek know each other?” Jen asked.
“We’ve gone to school together for a long time.” Taylor shrugged. “He gets teased a lot.”
“Yes. I heard about…well. I heard about the incident last year in the locker room.”
Taylor pressed her lips together disapprovingly.
It was her second time visiting Jen’s office in the past two weeks. It also happened to be the second time Taylor visited her office all year.
“Is everything okay?” Jen asked.
“I have a headache.”
Jen motioned toward one of her office chairs. Taylor sank into it, and Jen took her temperature, just in case. There wasn’t a line of students at her door. Today had been relatively slow, so she had time to be thorough. “Do you get headaches a lot?”
“I don’t usually, but I’ve been getting them lately.”
The thermometer beeped. 97.7 degrees.
She gave Taylor a quick eye examination. Her vision was perfect.
Perhaps the sudden onset of headaches had something to do with Shanice Williams, the new track star. Although she didn’t think they ran the same events and she saw them sitting together at lunch the other day. So maybe the headaches were wrapped up in her parents’ separation—something Jen hadn’t learned about until recently, when two teachers were gossiping in the lounge.
“I think they’re divorced now,” one of them said.
“They’re just separated. But I heard he has a girlfriend.”
When Jen realized who they were talking about, her jaw had nearly unhinged. She experienced that jolting feeling that came whenever she thought she had a person pegged but then they did something that drove the peg so far out of place she had to start all over again. Like the time her next-door neighbor in Clayton stuck a large Green Party sign in her lawn. Jen always thought her neighbor was Republican, and suddenly there was that sign. Her neighbors were passionately green. That was how it was with Camille.
No One Ever Asked Page 25
